New Haven U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro was in the national spotlight this week as an 18-year crusade to cut child poverty came to fruition.
At DeLauro’s original urging, the $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus bill signed by the president Thursday includes an expansion of the child tax credit that will cut child poverty in America by an estimated half. An estimated 27 million families will now cross the line out of poverty. It is considered the single greatest measure to reduce poverty in generations, a “children’s version of Social Security.” The credit will deliver $3,600 per child annually to low-income families, many of which received nothing under the old formula.
DeLauro began pushing for a credit expansion 18 years ago. Newly ascendant to leadership of the House Appropriations Committee, she was able to push it over the finish line this month.
DeLauro made the rounds of national media interviews this week as a result, and had a piece published in Time.
One of her stops was MSNBC’s “The Beat” with Ari Melber. Click on the video above to watch their seven-minute discussion on the tax credit, which includes C‑SPAN footage of DeLauro’s early days championing the credit.
In that discussion, and on other platforms, DeLauro got personal, recalling her own family’s economic struggles as she grew up in Wooster Square.
“Growing up in a very blue-collar family, where my dad was an insurance salesman. My mother was with the ILGWU, my mother was a garment worker and worked in the old sweatshops. They fell on hard times. And I can recall as a child when we came home on Friday evening with all our furniture on the sidewalk. We had been evicted, and we wound up living with my grandmother for a while until my family could get back on its feet. So, I grew up in a household where it really was a struggle financially,” DeLauro said.
Now if we could just raise the minimum wage to be the equivalent of the living wage for each individual state, we could raise the working poor out of poverty.